Public Domain 2024 Reviews: The Well of Loneliness
A look into the lesbian classic that paved the way for modern LGBT fiction.
When it comes to LGBT fiction, we’re now lucky to have a variety of stories dedicated to those of different sexual orientations and gender identities. While in the past, it was more common for such books to be about the struggles gay people dealt with when coming to terms with their identities and would sometimes have sad endings. Nowadays, thanks in large part to increased equality and visibility, there are many LGBT books where the identity of the characters isn’t the main focus of the stories, with stories featuring two gay people finding love in the way many straight, and various sci-fi, fantasy, and horror novels where the adventures and challenges the characters are brought up more often than their sexual identities.
While such increased inclusion is a good thing, those of us who are interested in classics might still want to look back and see where and when LGBT fiction got its start. There has probably been such work being produced for centuries, with some scholars tracing it as far back as Ancient Greece through the poetry of Sapho, a writer who lived in the island of Lesbos and was said to have had several female lovers (although there have always been some who try denying it), and many of her poems are said have been about her love for women. In the centuries since, there were sometimes books written featuring queer characters, but in which their identities and romantic interests were described in a rather subtle way, and not always in a positive light.
One of the first novels in English to directly address lesbian identity in an affirming way was Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness. This novel, which was written in an attempt to help sexual minorities gain greater acceptance within society, came about during an interesting time for LGBT individuals. Starting around the late 1800s, there was an increased awareness of those with different sexual identities because of field known as sexology. Among other things, sexology involved the study of individuals who were of different sexual orientations and gender identities. Such individuals were said by sexologists to have sexual inversion, a term coined by British sexologist Havelock Ellis. Many sexologists believed that sexual inversion was not the result of mental illness or moral depravity, but rather that it was a natural part of a person’s being, and often argued that these people, who sometimes identified as “inverts”, ought to be accepted by society rather than rejected as was often the case back then. Also, while male homosexuality remained illegal in much of the world, lesbianism wasn’t always outlawed. This may have been in part because some people believed women weren’t capable of same-sex love, but it still meant that some women, particularly if they were wealthy, were able to have romantic same-sex relationships without fear of legal persecution, despite the fact that it was often still frowned upon by society.
Radclyffe Hall, who was born Marguerite Antonia Radclyffe Hall in 1880, was a poet and novelist who identified as an invert. Her father had abandoned her mother when Hall was two years old, and she grew up having poor relationships with both her mother and her stepfather, the former who would frequently tell her that she’d been an unwanted child and would use up her inheritance money. When Hall grew older, she figured out she had inherited enough money from her father to live independently. She took to wearing masculine clothing, including suits and monocles (which at one point were a popular accessory among wealthy lesbians), and pursued many women.
In 1907, Hall met a singer named Mabel Batten, who was married and several years older than she was, and the two fell in love. After Batten’s husband died, the two women began living together. Under Batten’s influence, Hall did many things, including meeting other influential lesbians, converting to Catholicism, further pursuing her career as a poet, and going by the name “John”. In 1915, she fell in love with Batten’s cousin Una Troubridge, a sculptor and translator of literature, most notably for the work of the famous French writer Colette. Their relationship caused tension with Batten, who died not long afterwards in 1916, something which Hall felt strong guilt over. But despite this tumultuous start and the affairs Hall had with other women later on, she and Troubridge remained together for the rest of her life. The novel’s dedication- which reads “Dedicated to our three selves”- acknowledged Hall’s romantic relationships with both Batten and Troubridge. Her other novels prior to this one included The Unlit Lamp (1924), The Forge (1924), and Adam’s Breed (1926), with the last novel being her most successful at the time, having won two major awards and sold very well.
The novels begins around the 1880s when an aristocratic couple from the English countryside, Phillip and Anna Gordan, have their first child, who turns out being a girl. Phillip, whose family lineage mostly consists of men, had been wanting a boy and insists on still giving their daughter a boy’s name. Anna reluctantly agrees, and their daughter is named Stephen.
As a child, Stephen is a tomboy who dislikes wearing dresses and prefers what are considered boys’ games rather than traditional girls’ games. Her first experience with love is when she’s seven years old and becomes very fond of a servant called Collins. She prays that Collins will someday return her affection and does different things to get her attention, including scraping her own knees at one point upon finding out that Collins suffers from pain in the knees to try understanding what she goes through. One day, Stephen finds Collins outside with a man, and it turns out the two are in love with each other. This leaves Stephen heartbroken for the first time, and it becomes the first of a series of disappointments she must deal with for the rest of her life.
Not long after Collins leaves the household, Stephen starts developing an interest in horseback riding and goes on to own two horses. The first one she names Collins, while the other is named Raftery. For years, her world revolves around horseback riding and other physical activities. Since most of her education is at home, she rarely spends time with other children expect for two unpleasant children, Roger and Violet, whom her mother makes her spend time with. Her parents have different reactions to the way she is. Sir Phillip accepts it easily enough and allows her to be raised as if she were a boy. Lady Anna, on the other hand, is ashamed of the way her daughter is, but she tries to hide these feelings as she goes along with what her husband wants.
For a while, Stephen starts to lose interest in schoolwork and appears to be falling behind in this aspect. Her parents deal with this by hiring a governess that teaches French, and Stephen’s time is soon dedicated to both her typical physical activities and French lessons. When Stephen gets older, a governess named Miss Puddleton is hired to give Stephen lessons in other subjects. Miss Puddleton, who is called Puddle by Stephen, comes across as small, orderly, and wise. Under her instruction, Stephen becomes interested in her studies again and becomes an exceptional student. Later in the story, we learn that Puddle is an invert herself, and so she understands Stephen in a way that no one expect possibly her father can.
When Stephen turns eighteen, she’s very different from other young women, being very tall, broad-shouldered, and without most of the social graces most other women at that time would have developed by then. As a result, when she spends time with others her own age at social events, she comes across as awkward and unusual. But soon, she meets a Canadian man named Martin, and the two of them become friends due to their shared interest in outdoor activities and nature. However, while Stephen’s feelings for him are only platonic, Martin starts falling in love with her, and one day he proposes to Stephen. This incident overwhelms Stephen, and she ends up running away from him.
Not long after this event, Sir Phillip is hit by a tree, an event resulting in his death. Before he dies, he tries telling Lady Anna about Stephen being an invert, something he was able to figure out over the years by reading books on sexology. However, due to how weakened he was left, he dies without revealing this information to either his wife or his daughter. This becomes another heartbreaking moment in Stephen’s life.
But despite how much her father’s death impacts her, Stephen moves on from the incident soon enough. One day as she’s out driving, she nearly runs over the dog of a young American woman who’s recently moved to the area. The woman’s name is Angela Crossby, and she becomes the first woman Stephen falls in love with as an adult. After a while, she reveals her feelings to Angela, and although it’s unclear whether she loves Stephen back, Angela still returns her affection, with the two of them exchanging a kiss together and becoming more affectionate towards each other. Those around them don’t seem to approve much, including Angela’s husband Ralph, who ‘s a harsh man that often fails to make Angela happy and is immediately suspicious of her relationship with Stephen. Puddle also disapproves, but mostly because she’s convinced that Angela will eventually break Stephen’s heart.
The relationships comes to end when Stephen finds out that Angela is having an affair with Roger, her old childhood acquaintance. And to get back at Stephen for getting together with his wife, Ralph sends a letter to her mother revealing everything he knew about her affair. Lady Anna is left furious over this, and she finally confronts Stephen over how much of a disappointment she is to her, even going so far as to say her father would be ashamed of her if he’d known what she’d just done. Stephen defends what she did by saying that it is within her nature to love other woman, just as it is with men:
“As my father loved you, I loved. As a man loves a woman, that was how I loved-protectively, like my father. I wanted to give all I had in me to give. It made me feel terribly strong…and gentle. It was good,good,good-I’d have laid down my life a thousand times for Angela Crossby. If I could have, I’d have married her and brought her home to Morton. If I loved her the way a man loves a woman, it’s because I can’t feel that I am a woman.”
Her mother then makes her leave home but agrees to see her occasionally to make others think things between them are going well. As Stephen is preparing to leave home, she comes across some sexology books in her father’s old study, and after going over them, she realizes for the first time how she is and that her father understood it as well. She also goes through a Bible and reads the story of Cain in the book of Genesis, and she sees the mark of Cain as similar to how she must live her life as an invert. Puddle remains by her side after this incident, encouraging to go forward with her writing career for all those like her, telling her the following:
“Nothing’s completely misplaced or wasted. I’m sure of that-and we’re all part of nature. Some day the world will recognize this, but meanwhile there’s still plenty of work that’s waiting. For the sake of all the others who are like you, but less strong and less gifted perhaps, many of them, it’s up to you to have the courage to make good, and I’m here to help you to do it, Stephen.”
Years later, Stephen is living with Puddle in London. She has published a major first novel called The Furrow but is having trouble coming up with inspiration for more work, and she blames her lack of experiences for this. Her second novel, which is published after this distressful period, is less of a success than The Furrow was. She befriends a playwright named Brockett, who also happens to be an invert, who encourages her to visit Paris for inspiration. Upon going, Stephen comes to like the city and gets to know a charming wealthy lesbian named Valerie Seymour, who runs her own salon. This character was based on Natalie Barney, an American heiress and lesbian living in Paris who was a writer and hosted a salon that was often frequented by other lesbians, including Hall. All of this results in Stephen deciding to remain living in Paris.
During World War 1, a sense of patriotic duty inspires Stephen to return to England to serve as an ambulance driver taking in wounded soldiers. While there, another volunteer driver named Mary Llewellyn, a young woman who’s an orphan, grows close to Stephen, and the two of them fall in love. When the war ends, Mary agrees to return with Stephen to Paris to help her do things like sewing and writing up papers, but the real reason for this is so the two of them can live as lovers.
Although the two of them are happy together, they still find difficulties. At one point, they are both invited to an event being hosted by a wealthy woman. But when she hears rumors about their relationship, she withdraws the invitation on account of not wanting to be involved in scandals. This incident results in Mary becoming increasingly isolated from others, having to remain at home most of the time. It’s said that she isn’t exactly like Stephen, being more drawn to traditionally feminine activities and behavior, and this prevents her from handling this situation the way Stephen does.
It's upon getting some encouragement from Brockett that Stephen starts having both herself and Mary start interacting more with other inverts. Among them include a music composure named Jamie and her girlfriend Barbara, who’ve both known each other since childhood and lead a life full of hardship and struggling Polish painter named Wanda who’s an alcoholic. Along with these women, Stephen and Mary go to parties and bars that are often frequented by inverts, as well as spent time in Valerie’s salon. Stephen also gets to know Valerie better, and although the two of them tend to have different views on certain things, they go on to become friends. And while visiting the church of the Sacre Coeur with Wanda, Stephen’s religious faith starts to grow once again. For a while, things seem to be getting better for the couple.
But things don’t get easier for them. First, Barbara ends up getting seriously ill and dies. Not being able to bare to continue living without her, Jamie kills herself. This serves as a painful reminder of how just how difficult things can be for inverts for Stephen and Mary. Not long after, Stephen is reunited with Martin, who’s come to understand how she is and appears willing to accept her. They become friends again, but it soon becomes apparent to Stephen that Martin and Mary have become interested in each other and are probably having an affair.
When she confronts Martin about it, he says that Mary can’t continue living as Stephen does because she’s not suited for it and insists that she would be better off with him. Stephen refuses to accept this at first, but seeing just how hard things had been for Mary and how happy she seems to be with Martin, she decides it might be best for her if their relationship ended. To do this, she pretends to have an affair with Valerie, which results in Mary leaving her. In the end of the story, Stephen has a dream or vision where she sees other introverts, including some she knows and others who have yet to be born calling out to her, and she cries out “Acknowledge us, oh God, before the whole world. Give us also the right to our existence!”
There have been many debates about this story over the years not just from those who oppose homosexuality, but also from within the LGBT community from those who think that this story claims that to live a life as an LGBT individual means to live a life of endless suffering , as well as disliking the unhappy ending of the novel and the representation of women and those who are possibly bisexual in the novel. There’s also a lot of debate over Stephen Gordon’s identity, with some thinking she’s just a lesbian while others argue that she’s most likely transgender due to how she often says she feels more like a man than a woman.
For what it’s worth, I personally like this story and think it’s worthy of being considered an LGBT classic because of the way it shows the struggles some lesbians would have faced during the early 1900s. However, I’m willing to recognize that it has flaws. The beginning of the story was a bit hard to get through for me since it seemed to go into too much detail on life in the countryside, which got a bit dull at times. Some of the characters come across as stereotypical, with some of the gay characters given traits that seem outdated by today’s standards (like lesbians being very tall or thin and gay men being too flamboyant) while the heterosexual female characters are almost all depicted as typically feminine and often unpleasant. Also, Mary Llewellyn, who would probably be considered bisexual by today’s standards, seems to be treated a bit unfairly at times, with the way she at first must remain isolated from others and then others decide for her that she’s better off with a man. Being bisexual myself, it certainly gave me mixed feelings at times.
However, I really liked certain parts of the novel, especially the parts when Stephen is in Paris and the ones set during the war years. They reveal parts of history which many people aren’t aware of, and I always like getting to learn such information when reading fiction. And although I understood that others might feel differently than I do, I did appreciate the novel’s religious themes as a practicing Catholic myself. Reading such an old novel that calls for religious acceptance of sexual minorities at a time when this was very uncommon feels very moving, especially since such stories are usually rare in modern fiction.
Although some characters may come across as stereotypical, it’s still a far cry from other stories where presumed gay characters were depicted as villains or amoral individuals. Stephen Gordon is a good, hard- working person trying her best to get by in a world that often rejects her. Some of her choices are questionable, such as what she decides to do with Mary, but it’s important to remember that it was most likely done because Stephen truly cared about Mary’s well-being and didn’t want her to remain unhappy while living with her.
Other characters are just as sympathetic, with Puddle’s willingness to support Stephen and her career after her mother rejects her, Valerie providing a space for other gay individuals to meet each other and be themselves, Brockett often being straight forward about what Stephen needs, and Mary’s devotion to Stephen during their time as a couple. Although this representation could have been better in some ways, I think there’s still a lot that’s positive about it and deserves to be recognized for what it is.
As far as the ending goes, I certainly thought it was too sad and that both Stephen and Mary deserved better, but I understand that if the purpose of the novel was to bring awareness into how difficult the lives of sexual minorities were at the time, then perhaps the overall tone of the book and even the fates of certain characters were necessary. If the novel had the happy ending some modern readers might prefer, it probably wouldn’t have been as effective at getting its point across.
As for Stephen Gordon’s identity, I would prefer to avoid coming to exact conclusions on this. We must remember how sexology played a major role in both the writing of this novel and Hall’s understanding of her own sexual and gender identity, and that while this field did promote some good ideas, such as how sexual orientation is innate and not simply the result of a lack of morals or a bad upbringing, it also promoted several problematic ones, including suggesting that sexually inverted women had to have certain traits present, that they were more capable of enjoying sex than heterosexual, cisgender women were, and the conclusions by some sexologists that inverted women were really just repressed men. These ideas could have led some lesbians, including Hall, to think that they probably weren’t women at all.
This leaves a problem for modern readers and scholars trying to understand not just characters like Stephen Gordon, but also historical LGBT individuals, since we might never know for sure whether such individuals were truly transgender, or individuals whose gender identities were not aligned with the bodies they were born into, or if they were simply sexual minorities with a rather flawed understanding of gender that was shaped by the harmful stereotypes of the times they lived in.
As a result, the best we can do when studying such characters or historical figures is to simply accept the way they identified themselves and maybe use some of our more general terms for sexual minorities, such as LGBT, when describing them while keeping in mind that their identities aren’t completely clear by modern standards. We could still share our own opinions on the subject, but all while keeping in mind that we might never know for sure and that even our current labels can only tell us so much.
It should also be noted that this novel ended up being banned in the UK for 21 years on account of its theme. Shortly after its publication, critic James Douglas denounced the novel in The Sunday Express, declaring that “I would rather give a healthy boy or girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel” and called for action to be taken against it. A couple other publications did the same thing, resulting in charges towards the novel’s publisher, Jonathan Cape. Cape eventually withdrew the book after these complaints, but still licensed the rights to Pegasus Press in France. Copies that were published there soon found their way back to the UK, resulting in an obscenity trial being held in November 1928.
Hall’s defense team attempted to defend the novel by claiming that the relationships in the novel were only of an “intellectual” manner rather than romantic. Hall strongly objected to this and insisted this would be a betrayal to inverts. Others in the trial who testified in favor of the novel included Virginia Woolf (who testified despite not liking the novel herself, finding it too sentimental and moralistic), E.M. Forester (whose own novel on same -sex love, Maurice, would not be published until after his death), and Havelock Ellis. However, all their efforts failed. Although the novel didn’t include any sexual content (the only thing coming close to it is when the characters kiss), the magistrate of the trial, Sir Charles Biron, found the novel to be obscene simply on the basis of its supposed ability to corrupt, with any question of its literary merit declared irrelevant. The book was officially banned in Britain, and remaining copies were ordered to be burned right away.
A year later, there were attempts at banning the novel in the US, particularly in the state of New York, where another trial was held. However, the results there were different from those of the trial in the UK, and the novel was allowed to be published under the grounds that although the novel represented lesbianism positively, there were no strong descriptions of sexuality or anything else that was too objectionable, and therefore it wasn’t obscene. In 1949, six years after Hall’s death, The Well of Loneliness was published once again without any objections arising.
Despite all the censorship attempts, the novel went on to become a key source of information for young lesbians who were starting to gain awareness of their sexuality. One woman named Rene Sawyer said of the novel “To me it was my bible. To me: it had every aspect of tenderness, of love, of heartache, of anguish of problems-physical and mental problems- it had everything in that book. Which for me was a lifeline at that time.” Whether these women ultimately ended up accepting or rejecting the way the novel portrayed the lives of lesbians, it still left a permanent impact on many of them, resulting in the novel being coined as the “Lesbian Bible” and being considered a work of major historical significance for the LGBT community, even if some do question the book’s literary merit.
I think that now at a time when we’re seeing dozens of book bans and challenges in the US within schools and libraries is a good time to go over this novel’s impact, especially considered how many books under question include LGBT themes. As was the case with The Well of Loneliness, it’s not always about the actual content of these books, most of which might include just a few objectionable passages, but about the ideas some individuals fear young people might learn from these books. And while I personally can’t say I love every idea expressed within certain books, I still think it’s better for young people to learn about these ideas through books than through social media or other places where they might have to learn things the hard way.
And whatever content they may include, books have always had the power to help us learn to understand ourselves, view different perspectives, and see how we can improve things within our world. If we take away the ability for young people to access them, then we’re taking away a valuable tool that could eventually help them not only improve their own lives, but to also help make a difference for those around them. Unfortunately, there are still some individuals today who’d probably prefer to let kids drink acid than read books that portray LGBT individuals positively, but there are just as many individuals who are willing to either write these stories or allow young people to have access to them, a fact that should make all of us who care about reading and access to books happy.
With this novel now being in the public domain in the US, it gives us the opportunity to allow more people to access the novel and decide for themselves its value as an LGBT classic or perhaps even retell the story to take it in directions that weren’t possible in the 1920s. Some possibilities could include either a film adaptation or a novel where Stephen and Mary remain together and have a happier ending, or a modern retelling of the story exploring the possibility of Stephen being transgender. Another possibility could be writing a novel told through the point of view of other characters in the story such as Puddle, Valerie, or Mary. This was recently done with The Great Gatsby through a novel called The Chosen and the Beautiful, which retold the story through the point of view of Daisy Buckingham’s friend Jordon Baker, and Julia, which retells 1984 through the point of view of Winston Smith’s lover Julia. So far, I haven’t noticed this novel getting a lot of attention through the public domain announcements for this year, which is a shame because if there’s anything that’s worthy of attention at moments like these, it’s novels like this one.
Whatever one might think of this novel, I still see a lot of value in exploring classics like this. We can learn about the past and appreciate what writers like Hall did for readers who were able to feel represented and understood for possibly the first time while also seeing ways in which we can improve upon that representation through the novels we read or write in the present day. That way, we can build upon past progress and give LGBT individuals stories that they’ll hopefully appreciate for years to come.